This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,832.
For Tuesday 11 April 2023, today's show is entitled, How I Left Google Behind.
It is hosted by Minix and is about 30 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, just an overview of what services I now use to replace previously used Google
services.
This is Minix.
I thought I'd do a little overview of what I did to get rid of Google.
I'll replace all the different Google services used in the past and not really so much
why.
Just everybody has their own reasons.
I guess the main reason is I just wanted to have control over my data and services I used
and didn't really want to depend on another company to do that for me.
Mainly because if they ever go under, which Google is pretty big company, but still, if
they ever go under, then I just lose all my stuff and if I was going to lose everything,
I wanted it to be me that screwed up and not depending on another company.
So this is just kind of off the top of my head, so I made this a few things, but I wanted
to go ahead and get a show out for the queue, so I've been through lots of iterations
of different hardware to host these different services and it would deserve its own
show, everything I've tried for many PCs, the Raspberry Pi's, all that stuff, but currently
I've settled on just a decent desktop computer, which I use as a server.
It's got a 11.05 and 64 gigabytes of RAM and 12 terabytes of SSDs.
Now on top of that, I run ProxMox, which is a deviant-based hypervisor, and within that,
I run my services as either Linux containers or Virtual Machines depending on what the actual
application is, so I'll just kind of go down the line of what I host and what it replaces
for me as far as Google goes.
One of the first things I was interested in was NexCloud, before it was NexCloud, it was
own Cloud, and I had hosted that not really successfully on the original Raspberry Pi,
and there was so underpowered that just waiting for the web interface to load, took forever.
But that was my first kind of self-hosting experience.
Since then, I've gone through, like I've said, lots of different machines, but currently
I run NexCloud on the ProxMox server.
And that helps me replace things like Google Drive, Google Photos.
I was using it for Google Photos quite a bit to the point that I got a message from Google
eventually that said, if you want to use this much data, you can have to start paying
for it, which was another reason that I kind of wanted to get off Google Services.
Like I said, if I'm going to pay for something, I'd rather be something that I physically
own here rather than Cloud Storage on somebody else's computer.
So NexCloud handled my handle's, my photo library now, it handles my notes, so I was
using Google Keep, I believe it's called, you know, for a long time, which was nice
because I could access it across different browsers and machines, as long as I had a Gmail
account.
And now I use NexCloud Notes instead.
There's a few features that doesn't have that Google Keep does, but it's nothing that
prevents me from using it as I like to use it, which is just a simple note-taking app.
I don't really use it to compose letters or anything like that.
That's more, and kind of the open office territory.
Which is another thing that I use NexCloud for, is for office applications like, like
a, you know, or do you have Google sheets and stuff like that.
I use the NexCloud Office for that.
So follow notes, just general data that would go to Google Drive and I'll keep on my
NexCloud.
The next thing was getting my email up and running, and that's the very first Google service
I started with was email.
Everything I researched online made it seem like you had to be like a hardcore admin, you
know, graveyard to everyone on email server.
But honestly, if you have the right ISP that will allow certain ports to be open with
25, so that you can send and receive email, it's not that difficult.
At least the way I run it is not.
I use an application called IRedmail.
I use the community edition, so you have to maintain it yourself, but it's free and open
source, and that's installed within a VM on ProxMox on Debian.
And it's not really, I mean, it's a little daunting at first getting it set up.
But once it's set up and you have your spam filters working and you have your, you know,
your DMark records, everything within your DNS setup correctly is long as your ISP allows
you, like I said, to have like, you know, port 25 open, which mouse servers need, what's
a lot of ISPs don't.
So if you're going to host an email server, check first with your ISP that you can actually
do so, host an email server.
With my ISP, it's not really a problem.
I actually just call them and told them what I was going to do, and they open the port
right up for me, so, but you might want to check beforehand, just to make sure you send
before you actually get into installing it.
So I use our redmail, there's like a million different options out there, and it comes
with a nice little administrative interface, web-based interface, and I have that on, I believe
256 gigabytes of space, and I have my personal email and my kind of contracting email
that I do different work on with customers as well, and then I have an email address on
there that I use just for like promotional stuff, you know, enter contest or design up
for different things.
So, and that works pretty well, and I don't really have an issue with spam here with
our email, and I think I use about four gigs of RAM with that virtual machine from
my email, but like I said, if you take the time to read the docs and take your time
with setup and go through all the instructions carefully, and I have just at least a basic
knowledge of the way computers and networking works, and Linux in my case, I think you
will find it's not nearly as daunting as they say it is, so I use my mail server for
everything, mail-related now, I don't, then I'm teaching email or any other email service.
So that replaced Gmail for me, as far as a music app, I was big into Google Play Music,
and it was cool at the time because you could upload all of your music to Google Play Music
and then you could access it for free with the app, and if you wanted to use their music
library, like for things you didn't own, you could pay a fee just like any other music
streaming service, and I did that for a while, I had Google Play Music, and I had a big
library on there, and it worked okay until they switched to YouTube music, and then I hated
it, I hated the interface, I hated a lot of my music that I had uploaded was no longer
on there, I guess because of licensing rights, and the quality of the audio was bad, it was
like they were using YouTube video, YouTube videos of the songs that I had uploaded, you know,
and high quality, and playing them back, and you know, as like a low quality YouTube video
quality, and even if I had changed the settings, the high quality, it's still a sad bad,
and a friend of mine had to spotify a family account, so he put me on there, and that was
better than YouTube music, I still have that account, I don't use it for much, but the
quality at least was better, and the number of artists was more varied, and but still there
were things that I would look for on there that I owned, that I knew existed because I
listened to them, but they just weren't on Spotify, and so I said, well, I got this giant
music library, well, and I just hosted myself as well, so what I came into was a funk well,
which if you remember there was a service called Groove Shark a long time ago that you could
upload your own music library to, and then you could play other songs from other people's libraries,
and it was all free, it was ad-supported, but basically, you know, you didn't pay anything,
and that eventually got killed by, I think, copyright holders and things like that, so
funk well, you could say, is kind of like the Groove Shark spiritual successor,
that's kind of where they get the name, and it's a, you know, the self-host data,
or they have recommended hostages too, but it not only does it host you music library,
but the web interface is really nice, and the mobile app is really nice, I use it for Android,
and also, it's federated too, it's part of the Fediver, so if anybody else, you know, you can
follow somebody's music library from any federated app, or you can federate your funk well
over with theirs, which I do was with one of my co-hosts on a Linux podcast, we have federated our
servers together, so we can share a music, and it's, it's, it's a really good, not just music
listening, but music sharing, application, and, and it's good at, you know, tagging your music and
all that stuff, it's what I use for, for, in place of play music slash YouTube music, I have
Spotify now, and I like, you know, I've been able to, you know, browse other people's libraries
and find find a lot of cool stuff too, that kind of how how Spotify recommends your music,
I can browse other people's federated libraries, and do the same thing with funk well, and plus
it's my music, you know, it's not gonna go away anytime soon unless I just screw up my server or
something, but speaking of YouTube music, there's also YouTube, as in the original video service,
which I, I still use, but I use it in a way that I'm not logging into Google, and so I guess it's
not completely leaving Google behind, but for me, it's a lot better experience,
which I use a service called Invidious, which I host myself, and it's just a, it's an alternate
user interface for YouTube, and it's very low in resources, I think I only give it, I could give you
RAM or something, but you can create a account on your Invidious server, you can give the address to
other people, so they can use your Invidious server, but what it does is it gives you a way to browse
YouTube without logging in to a Gmail account, and also it blocks ads, and it gives you other
options like, like you can download videos straight from the Invidious web interface and things like
that, now it doesn't have, like, its own mobile app, which is okay, I mean, I use it in the browser,
it's fine, but what I do like about it is that that include all the cred that I hate about YouTube,
as far as recommend to me things that I have zero interest in, and that have nothing to do with
what the kind of videos I actually watch, you can import your YouTube subscriptions into
Invidious as well, so you'll have all your subs there, and YouTube has really gotten bad,
like, as in just crummy lately, I used it the other day just to kind of look through around,
you know, I was like, man, I'm really glad that I don't, this isn't the main interface I used
that access YouTube now, I use Invidious, and that it just, I mean, the amount of things that they
try to push on you, that's just terrible, I mean, it's like terrible videos, all this clickbait stuff,
and, you know, anyway, that's the whole other story, but Invidious is what I used to view YouTube,
not a host by own videos, instead of using YouTube, like I did in the past, I used peer to,
and peer to YouTube is another self-hostible web application that you can upload your videos to,
it's federated as well, so you can browse other federated peer to instances, and the name kind of gives
you a clue as into how it works, where it, it doesn't just stream from your server, it also
uses other peers that are part of the network to help you stream the data, so it doesn't
bog down your server, if you have a lot of people watching your videos, and you can comment on videos,
you can add hashtags, you can do whatever you want to, just like you can, YouTube. Now, of course,
the audience is way, way smaller, and if you really want to engage with people, you're going to have
a lot harder time, and then you would with YouTube, which already has a huge built-in audience,
but peer toops getting bigger and better every day, but it's self-hosted and it's federated,
so you're going to have to understand that as you're searching for things, you may come across
videos or opinions, things like that that you don't agree with, and then would never be allowed
on YouTube or any other centralized service, but that's kind of the trade-off of a self-hosted
or federated option like that, is anybody can pretty much post whatever they want, and there's
ways to block those things, and block other users that you find like trolls and stuff like that,
so ways to do that, but for me anyway, it is satisfying to see people engage with my videos
on peer to, but I don't, you know, I don't make it's not monetized or anything like that,
but also I don't have ads or anything, you know, that a centralized service would try to push
into your videos or make you watch if you're watching other videos, so as far as YouTube goes,
I use it in videos to watch YouTube videos and I use peer to post my own videos, so let's see
what else. Hangouts, Google Hangouts, I was a big user of that, and of course we all know what happened
to Google Hangouts, and now I have no idea what it is, Google Chat, I think they had several other
services, it's in the graveyard pretty much though, so Hangouts was pretty big with me and my friends
because even if you had an Android phone and somebody else had an Apple phone, it would, you know,
it was cross-platform and we could all chat with each other and different Hangout rooms and stuff like that,
and from there I went to Signal or Telegram, I'm not sure which one I went to first,
but it may have been Telegram, and that was okay, you know, people weren't as familiar with Telegram,
once again, even though it's a more privacy oriented, you don't own the main server and you don't
really have access to it and so it's always kind of bugging me in the back of my mind and signals
the same way, I mean it's open signals open source of course, but unless everybody subscribes to
your Signal server, you're not going to be able to communicate with other Signal users, so it's open
source, but it's still centralized, and there's there's text messages to things like that,
but ultimately I kind of settled on the Matrix protocol using the Synapse server and the
element as a client, so Matrix has been a big kind of boon for me as far as finding other
like-minded people through different Matrix rooms and then chatting with my friends and we have
a Matrix room for the lug cast and, you know, where people can gather and so it's replaced,
you know, things like Google Hangouts and Telegram and stuff like that, and I host my own Matrix server,
so I have control over it, you know, I don't have to worry about it, somebody pulling the service
I'm dating, and I've used Discord in the past as well, which is pretty cool, but from what's
like to be upfront in this episode, I got banned from Discord, and it wasn't anything I did,
and it was- I think I was using a Yahoo email account and it had gotten hacked or something,
so apparently we ever had my Yahoo account and disseminated all this spam and stuff, and so
they, of course, they didn't listen anything I had to say, which I didn't really care,
I wasn't even best didn't Discord, but so that got me out of Discord, which is kind of what
turned me on to Matrix in the first place, is because, well, who's going to ban me from other
server and nobody, you know, and also what I hear from other people from friends is Discord is kind of
they're really pushing their paid service, maybe nitro or something like that, and
there was some kind of uproar about terms and conditions that, anyway, I don't really keep up with
that stuff, but to me, it seems like as far as a chatting service goes, you want to keep those
chats that you have with friends and maybe you want to go back and look at things that you
said in the past and look at web links and stuff like that, and if that all depends on Discord,
always being there, or always providing you access and not paywalling you at some point in time,
and I think you are maybe, be heading for, you know, a bad time in the future or something
that ever happens to all your messages and stuff like that, so that kind of starred me on the
whole Discord thing, and I move permanently to Matrix, and I've enjoyed Matrix, and I recommend
everybody, at least give it a try, you can sign up, you know, a free account on Matrix.org, and
just see if you like it, and see if you can talk to friends and enjoy it as well, so far as chatting
programs, you know, chatting applications, Matrix, and around about way has replaced Google
Hangouts for me. I see what else I'm trying to think. Okay, I know one thing that I still rely on Google for,
it's just in full disclosure, is I use Google domains for all my domains, but I don't have to,
you know, that's one thing that's that there's so many domain providers out there that I could
sign up with anybody, it's just me being lazy, and honestly, they don't collect a lot of
information for me when it comes to, you know, just having a domain service with them, so it's
not like a Gmail account where everything is recorded and stuff like that, so I'm a, you know,
switch just to fully get off Google in the future, but I'm not really not in the big hurry,
so it's not, because it's, it's not a big deal, it's cheap to 12 bucks a year or so, and they're,
they're reliable, so I'm trying to think, I know there's something, okay, social, kind of like social
media, I don't know if anybody that's listening, I would use it in the past, but Google Plus,
I thought it was great. That was one of the things that Google did that was really disappointed
that they got rid of, because to me, it did social media right, or as far as, you know, the
people that you interact with, you could have any circles, and it was very tech-oriented as far
as the audience that I was drawn to on Google Plus, and it wasn't just full of ads, you know,
of course they were harvesting your data, which is how they were coming down a float, and I don't
think it really took off, like in the mainstream, so, you know, just like a lot of Google products,
kind of went away, but at that, at the time, I thought they did a good job with Google Plus,
and that was my main kind of social media outlet with Google Plus, and after that went away,
I went to Newy, which I still haven't accounted, I just don't visit it anymore,
and Newy is actually, or is actually, I think it's still around, it's still pretty good,
as far as I know, you know, a lot of people don't use it, like they used to, and, but, you know,
they tell you it's privacy-oriented, and it's very minimal, as far as ads go, and things like that,
and that lots of groups and stuff, cool groups, which is what I like about Google Plus to,
Facebook has always been like a non-starter with me, there's just way too many things wrong with Facebook.
I could do a whole show on that, things that are on the Facebook, Twitter, I just don't really care
about, so Google Plus, and then Mewee was cool, and, but now that I've gone kind of the self-hosted
route, I just took to master it on, I was moaned, I was moaned, I was, which is also really easy to do,
you can know, I hosted natively, in a virtual machine, I think I have about 128 gigabytes of
a hard drive space on there, and then maybe only like 2 gigabytes of RAM, I can't remember it.
I have to go back and look, but anyway, it doesn't take, it's not very resource intensive either,
and depending on what you post, you really don't need a lot of space, but as far as just like
following people that I'm interested in, and putting my own projects out there and just quick
little notes and photos and stuff like that, I'm actually just sticking to master it on my own
mastered on instance, and it's federated as well, so that, as far as like tech-oriented things,
that I'm really interested in, mastered on does a good job of replacing Google Plus for me,
for what I need it for, or what I want it for, I don't need it for what I want it for.
If I want to write longer-form things, I have a blog that I can do that with, and I use
right-freely, which is a, I like a blogging service that you can host yourself, or you can sign
up for a right-freely account on the own, but it's federated as well, so I mean, I can follow
anybody's right-freely blog from any other federated service, like mastered on, you know, people
follow my right-freely blog from their own mastered on account and stuff, and so for like
longer-form articles that aren't just quick messages on mastered on, I'll post them a blog
that's right-freely. And I recommend right-freely, it's really easy, it's just a real simple
web service, and I have that in a Linux container. I think I have like one to go on for that, and maybe
64-year-olds of hard drives, based I believe, of storage on that container, which is more than enough
for how you use it for mailing just writing, and sometimes small videos, if I post a video on
the area, it would be linked back to my peer too, which I have plenty of storage on, so I'm trying
to think of what else I might use the Google services. I use Android, which, you know, as a Google
company, but I would really like to go to a Linux phone one day right now, the whole Linux mobile
landscape is a little rough, but I still have hope, you know, because the pine phone and what
Librum is done in other companies, that they will keep advancing in a way that I can actually
use it as a daily driver without sacrificing too much. As long as I have certain applications,
you know, GPS is what I use a lot of my phone, and things like that, so I'm hoping in the future,
I can get rid of Android too, which would, I guess, would kind of be the final nail in the
coffin for Google. For me, I still use Google search, but other search engines are catching up,
especially with ChadGPT integration and things like that, so sometimes you're used being,
there's several self-hosted search engines that you can use as well. I can't remember the names of them all
but yeah, I've tried them in the past and I had a hard time searching for things, finding what
I wanted. That the goal was decent, I used that the goal quite a bit, along with Google,
search and being and things like that, but I wouldn't really call that, you know,
because I don't log into that, I mean, I'm sure they keep a history of what I search for,
but I'm not logged in when I'm doing searching on Google searches, and so I don't really
wouldn't say that that's anything, you know, that I would miss if Google search went away,
and there's plenty of other search engines. So I can't really think of any other Google search,
as I use. I guess Android is a big one, as long as I use Google maps on my phone too,
which open street maps have been looking at a lot, and I wanted to contribute to that as well. So
oh and oh, I don't think my title might be a little misleading how I left Google behind,
because I didn't completely leave it, but I was able to replace a lot of the services that
I'd used Google for in a past, and maybe this will give you kind of an overview of some things
that you can do if you want to, if you want to decentralize your digital life and get off of
Google or Microsoft and some of the big players out there. So if you get any questions,
feel free to leave any comments on the HPR or episode page, and that I'd be happy to answer them
for now, have a good night, and I'll talk to you later.
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